wow... it works! thanks! I noticed now when you type "textastic mel" on google this post will come up first, so hopefully future mel coders who face this problem can find the solution here :D

I need select syntax definition the first time? Haha... Sry didn't read the manual...

Anyways you didn't have ANSI support. Or it is because ANSI goes by a different name? I did try setting it to ASCII but it keeps returning to UTF-8 encoding... Which is not supported by maya